Then she heard a rushing sound of wind, wailing, moaning, threshing, roaring sullenly in the distance.
She spurred her broncho into the darkness lit by flashes of this lurid light.
A flash of light.
Then darkness, thick as purple velvet.
Furiously she urged the animal forward into this horrible unknown which had the look of the wrath of G.o.d come upon her for her doubting, pressed on by an innate feeling of affection for those two who had befriended her, hurrying to their aid, spurred by an instinctive foreboding of impending evil in this awful roaring, whirling, murderous sound of the wild winds gone suddenly stark mad.
As she sped on, something swept past her with a great hoa.r.s.e roar, distinguishable above the deafening roar of the wind.
It was Seth"s herd, stampeding, running with the wind and bellowing with fear.
She winged her way into the terror of the darkness.
Ready an hour before for death in any form, she now all at once found herself panting with fear of it, gasping with a deadly fear of a ghastly fate, of being crushed and mangled, of dying by inches beneath some horrible weight, but this did not deter her.
Afraid to breathe a prayer to the G.o.d whom she had dared to question, she winged her way breathlessly on and on.
Then sheets of water, as if the skies had opened and emptied themselves,--and a vivid flash of lightning revealing the wind"s wet wings, its wild whirling fingers dripping.
Cyclona saw it coming in that flash, a fiendish thing apparently alive, copper-colored, funnel-shaped, ghastly. She threw herself forward on the neck of her broncho, grasping his mane. Then a blow from a great unseen hand out of the darkness struck them both, felling them.
During the next few minutes of inky blackness, of indescribable terror, of flying missiles armed with death, Cyclona lay unconscious.
When she opened her eyes a calm light of the evenness of twilight had spread over the track of the cyclone, and her head lay pillowed on Hugh Walsingham"s shoulder. Close beside her was a ragged bough and her broncho lay dead near by. The bough was the hand that had struck them out of the darkness, had thrown her to the sod and killed her animal.
"I came very near," she sighed, "to standing before G.o.d."
By and by with Walsingham"s help she stood.
"Where is the house?" she asked, bewildered by the barrenness of the spot on which the topsy turvy house had stood for so many years.
"It is gone," said he.
Cyclona pressed both hands to her face and rocked back and forth, sobbing.
G.o.d had spared her, true, but He had offered her this delicate irony of leaving her homeless.
Hugh looked moodily out over the place of the topsy turvy house, his own mind awhirl with the maddening force of the furious winds through which he had pa.s.sed.
"In Kansas," said he, grimly, "it is the wind that giveth and the wind that taketh away."
Then, looking tenderly at the girl in his arms, he added softly: "Blessed be the name of the wind!"
CHAPTER XXI.
[Ill.u.s.tration]
Thereafter at station after station, a tall, gaunt man may have been seen handling baggage, running errands, caring for the cattle, doing any sort of work, no matter how humble, that lay to his hand, making his way slowly, wearily but steadily on toward the South.
Seth, working his way home to Celia.
He slept in baggage cars, on cattle trains. He swung to steps of trains moved off and clung there between brief stations. He stopped over at small towns and earned his bread at odd jobs, bread and sufficient money sometimes to move on steadily for a day or two.
Strange weathers burned and bit him. He walked heavily in the path of the wind overhung by pale clouds. He slept under the stars out in the open.
It was days before he pa.s.sed the plains, the place of the sleepless winds where wan white skies bent above the gra.s.s of the hot dry pulse, the lifeless gra.s.s that wailed into the ceaseless wind its dirge of death and decay.
It was weeks before he reached Kansas City, the city of hills, with lights hung high and lights hung low. Here he found a place as brakeman and worked his way into Missouri.
Here it was as if an ocean steamer had suddenly stopped the whir of its wheels at the approach of the pilot come out from sh.o.r.e to tug it in.
The wind had stopped blowing.
The position was only temporary. Another brakeman taking his place, Seth walked.
He was not sorry to walk in this quiet land. How tenderly green the shrubbery was, how beautiful! Mingled with the darker green of the cedar and pine, the brown green of the cone.
How sweet the slow green trees! Not windswept! Not torn by the wild, wet fingers of the wind, not lashed with hot and scathing fingers gone dry with drought, but still and peaceful.
A sleepy world of streams it was, a sleepy world of streams and sweet green trees among whose leaflets gentle zephyrs breathed scarcely perceptible sighs of pure contentment.
Patiently, contentedly, he walked mile after mile through this beautiful Missouri which was so like home, among these tall, sighing trees, under the protection of their great still umbrella-like heads, thinking of his dream Celia, whom he was so soon to see.
The absence of the wind had left his brain clear. Since it was so short a time until his dream was to become a reality, no longing or heartache served to set his brain afire with the agony of despair.
Calmly he walked in the white straight rain among the tender trees, his tired brain clear, thinking of her.
How would she receive him?
Surely, in spite of his empty-handedness, she would greet him lovingly because of their long separation and the death of the child. Surely she would receive him lovingly because of the endless days that had divided them. Those days! Those days! But he refused to let his mind dwell on the deadly length of them. It might sadden again.
In the world, he reasoned, there were those two only, Celia and himself. Should they not cling together?
True, he would arrive empty-handed, but he could make a living for her and himself in the old town. He was not without friends there. There were those who had loved him in the olden time. They would give him work. They would help him build up his lost fortunes. He would spend his life in retrieving, in compensating to Celia for the foolish years that he had spent dreaming dreams.
In St. Louis he remained for weeks, working about the station in the effort to earn enough for his ride to Cincinnati. At length he succeeded, but on an emigrant train.
He rode for a day, looking out the window at the landscape swimming by rather than at his wild-eyed companions, crowded together like sheep.
At the end of the day he arrived at Cincinnati.
And then Seth came into--into G.o.d"s country.